Many of us are already using onboard body communications channels, its just that we don’t realise it yet. Take your Nike+iPod for instance. Yes, the little bit in your trainer that allows you to track your running data and calories burned whilst listening to your music.
“Well thats an on-body communications channel in its simplest format,” explains Professor Peter Hall from the University of Birmingham. “And it appeals to people because they understand it.”
However, although sport has been a good entry to market for some like Nike, it’s the medical side of things that Hall is more fascinated with.
“We’re interested in doing antenna and radio wave propagation, related to the human body,” he adds. “We call it body centric wireless communications and people putting medical sensors on the body is where this is going.”
At the moment this involves devices talking to some central kind of base station fitted to a belt, but this really is heading towards the realms of Star Wars and Terminator – fascinating stuff indeed.
In his work Hall is trying to figure out the energy that’s coming off the antenna and solve problems like drained batteries for these type of applications. After all, as he points out, batteries and wires coming out of your head and other parts of your body aren’t particularly pleasant or comfortable, or good for your social life.
“Putting a battery inside a body is a nasty thing to do,” he says. “Chemically it’s not good and you have a power problem. The same goes for the brain. To minimise the power so it can use natural sources like blood-flow, heat and movement, you’ve got to understand the wireless and make it optimised.”
Hall says he is using advanced games animation software and electromagnetic simulation to model and predict what’s happening to implants as they talk to a base stations on your belt as you walk around, and he believes we’re quickly heading towards systems that interfere less with each other.
“Right now, the UK has a programme called FIST (Future Infantry Soldier Technology) which will incorporate some of these links,” he adds. “In the US they already have huge programmes incorporating physical condition sensors like pulse and temperature distributed around a soldier’s body so that those in the command post can see what’s actually happening to their soldiers in the field. Things are developing at a fast pace.”
Tags: Future Infantry Soldier Technology, iPod, onboard body communications, Professor Peter Hall
